“... found in the woods on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire, two months after he’d revealed that the Blair administration had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Rachel Wells, the central character in Number 11 and the narrator of the first of its five overlapping stories, was ten when Kelly’s body was discovered. She was staying with her ...”

“... prime ministers since Margaret Thatcher have wanted to be Thatcher in one way or another. Tony Blair hoped to emulate not just the longevity of her tenure but also the impact she had on the country. Cameron would have liked to remake the Conservative Party in his own image, as she remade it in hers. Theresa May simply wanted to be as formidable ...”

“... he’s never done. And ‘fresh’? His flirtatious, boom-boody-boom examination of Tony Blair at close quarters is the best contender. Dr Hitchens says of the appealing patient who followed him into the deserts of Mesopotamia: ‘There is a moral pulse to be detected here and it’s quite a strong one’ (Vanity Fair, February). Hitchens ...”

“... for the answer. But the answer, of course, was there all along: more thought. More argument. For Blair to deny that the invasion of Iraq influenced the bombers is an insult to both language and morality. For Islamic extremists to pretend that their cause will not be set back in Britain by targeting buses and tubes is a murderous delusion. ...”

“... quickly onto the next serving of success and pain, voting new people on and new people off, and to Tony Blair and culture-surfers everywhere, it can seem like a nice way of having a democracy. Tony Blair asked for a meeting with one of the judges on Popstars, Pete Waterman, and sought his advice on how to harness ...”

“... in his beliefs. His manifesto promised ‘change’, but its real commitments were sparse. Unlike Tony Blair, Starmer inherits a broken and dysfunctional country. Where Blair surfed a burgeoning economic boom and aspired to a frictionless world united under Visa, Starmer’s Britain is stuck in protracted ...”

“... if the Agreement was to survive. An unofficial ‘Save David’ campaign was launched by Tony Blair. Much was made of the personal trust that existed between the two men. There were photos galore, and reassurances aplenty. In an attempt to boost the Unionist ‘Yes’ vote in May’s referendum, Blair wrote a ...”

“... to the right had already learned to put their faith in the God of Small Things. True, they sighed, Blair and the rest had accepted social authoritarianism, ‘flexible’ working practices, rampaging inequality and Conservative taxation and spending programmes. Yet for all the compromises, there were still cheering contrasts between the old and new ...”

“... Falklands, to encourage UN and world support for our operations to evict them. Now George Bush and Tony Blair are suggesting that a pre-emptive armed attack on Iraq, far from being a grave breach of international law, is justified because it is aimed at preventing Saddam Hussein from making weapons of mass destruction available to terrorist ...”

“... down. Thatcher made the breakdown the basis of her programme, and it was this that attracted Tony Blair. Together with Gordon Brown and the rest of the small group that created New Labour, Blair understood that the rise of Thatcher was not an aberration, as nearly everyone on the left believed. A rupture had ...”

“... Tony Parsons is the talented journalist who used to play Leonard Bast to Tom Paulin’s rentier intellectual on Late Review, the BBC’s weekly parade of Schlegelisms. He was the mean little man with the Estuary accent who was entitled to his views. He currently writes a column for the Mirror and his opinions spill forth also now in novels ...”

“... to be replaced by something resembling coherence, and with a plan that is credible and realistic.Tony Blair, 21 August 2021Before Afghanistan,​ the US air force had no armed drones in its arsenal. Since 2001, ever increasing numbers of ever more sophisticated devices have been used to map enemy positions and conduct strikes – against al-Qaida and ...”

“... 2016 would indeed be the latest that the first replacement submarine could be ordered. So why did Tony Blair say in his foreword to the 2006 White Paper that ‘the present submarines will start to leave service in the early 2020s and we have to decide now’ – in December 2006 – ‘whether we want to replace them’? The reason seems to be that ...”

“... Missile Defense, closer and closer links with Russia, reliance on the dutiful co-operation of Tony Blair, and a general lack of concern for the Chinese – referred to as ‘Klingons’ by Clancy’s Republican Presidential hero. Today, with their faith in technology reaffirmed by the apparent effectiveness of precision guided missiles and ...”

“... that a second resolution would be required – as had the attorney general, Sir Peter Goldsmith. Tony Blair himself had tried to secure a second resolution. But then, just as the negotiations for a second resolution – handled by Greenstock – failed, the attorney general changed his view, declaring that Resolution 1441 itself revived the ...”